4 - The Path-Dependent Rise and Demise of the Alliance, 1959–69

Summary

This chapter will present and interpret the results of the elections of 1959, 1964 and 1969 and show the success of Alliance consociational electoral politics until its collapse in 1969. The Alliance, which saw its birth as a coalition of three ethnic parties in 1955, was able throughout this period to capitalize on its power-sharing arrangements and overcome most of its political opponents until its near defeat in 1969. As shown in the previous chapter, it had tasted success in the 1952 Kuala Lumpur municipal elections and thereafter won every national election from 1955 to 1969. However, the Alliance was unable to maintain its two-thirds control of parliamentary seats in 1969, a year which saw the outbreak of racial riots in Kuala Lumpur. By the beginning of the period, its major opponents, the IMP and Party Negara, were already assigned to history. Then, the parliamentary Left, led by the Socialist Front, mounted a concerted challenge as the main parliamentary opposition, until it chose to opt out of the electoral process, not least of all because of its own internal ethnic divide. It was left to the Malay-based PMIP to become the Alliance's major opponent.

Up until 1969, a path dependence of mediated communal, though elite-managed, consociational consensus was fully established by the Alliance, which remained the dominant ruling coalition throughout this first period of electoral politics after Independence from the British. A particular trajectory of politics may be said to be pathdependent when it exhibits not only immediate returns in political and economic gains but when it also establishes or reinforces institutional arrangements and structures that help to sustain and accelerate such gains. The maintenance of such a system was clearly premised on political investment in institutional arrangements, which largely kept the peace, orchestrated by ethnic elites who dominated their respective parties. Most importantly, attaining the necessary and sufficient conditions of mediated communalism, as expounded in Chapter 1, made for the ruling coalition's electoral longevity. This book posits that such path dependence was indeed generated by the early success of the Alliance in the 1950s and 1960s and reconstituted highly successfully under the Barisan Nasional (National Front) alliance in the 1970s through to the late 1990s. However, a major rupture of this path-dependent success did occur in the 1969 election, as this chapter will demonstrate.